True, coming back to school after a month
spent fighting - and defeating - adult superheroes is a bit of a comedown for
the Inscrutable Machine. When offered
the chance to skip school in the most dramatic way possible, Penelope Akk can’t
resist. With the help of a giant spider and mysterious red goo, she builds a spaceship
and flies to Jupiter.

Mutant goats.

Secret human colonies.

A war between three alien races with humanity
as the prize.

Robot overlords and evil plots.

Penny and her friends find all this and more
on Jupiter’s moons, but what they don’t find are any heroes to save the day.
Fortunately, they have an angry eleven year old and a whole lot of mad science…

About the Author

Richard Roberts has fit into only one
category in his entire life, and that is ‘writer’, but as a writer he’d throw
himself out of his own books for being a cliche.

He’s had the classic wandering employment
history - degree in entomology, worked in health care, been an administrator
and labored for years in the front lines of fast food. He’s had the appropriate
really weird jobs, like breeding tarantulas and translating English to English
for Japanese television. He wears all black, all the time, is manic-depressive,
and has a creepy laugh.

He’s also followed the classic writer’s path,
the pink slips, the anthology submissions, the desperate scrounging to learn
how an ever-changing system works. He’s been writing from childhood, and had
the appropriate horrible relationships that damaged his self-confidence for
years. Then out of nowhere Curiosity Quills Press demanded he give them his
books, and here he is.

As for what he writes, Richard loves children
and the gothic aesthetic. Most everything he writes will involve one or the
other, and occasionally both. His fantasy is heavily influenced by folk tales,
fairy tales, and mythology, and he likes to make the old new again. In
particular, he loves to pull his readers into strange characters with strange
lives, and his heroes are rarely heroic.